I was heading out for a walk last Sunday, and was chatting with my husband while getting ready. He was wondering out loud what to do for the rest of the afternoon, and I said “Do something that seems fun right now!” His response was: “No, I think I should do something unpleasant instead!”
We both immediately cracked up because of course, in that moment, he meant that as a joke. However, we were also laughing because we both know that each of us has long held the belief that doing unpleasant things is somehow morally superior to doing fun activities. We have helped each other interrogate that belief (and we are still working through and questioning versions of it almost weekly).
Even though it sounds pretty funny when you say it out loud, a lot of us do hold the belief that unpleasant activities are better and more virtuous than fun ones. The underlying logic usually goes something like this: unpleasant activities accomplish something (whether a physical result of producing some work, or another result such as personal growth), and producing something is always superior to not producing something.
Of course, on the other side of the same coin is the thought that pleasurable activities are morally inferior, sinful, and even plain dangerous. So it’s better to limit them and ensure that we “deserve” them before we allow ourselves to experience pleasure or fun. Or, if we end up “indulging” in fun activities for too long, we need to pay for that with guilt and self-admonishment.
There are deep cultural and religious underpinnings to this belief system that would take a lot more space to unpack than this post. The very short version is that the various systems of oppression that we live in intersect in ways that portray pleasure as dangerous for everyone, but particularly dangerous and forbidden for marginalized social groups. In other words, digging into the origins of the “suffering is superior while pleasure is inferior” belief will reveal many racist, sexist, classist, and other oppressive beliefs.
All of that is to say that, what we have consciously and subconsciously learned about pleasure is total BS, designed to intentionally perpetuate various systems of oppression throughout human history. But realizing that does not make it easy to let go of those beliefs, especially when it comes to ourselves. For a lot of us, it is much easier to believe and acknowledge that moralizing other people’s activities based on whether they are pleasant or not is silly. And yet, we find that we are still firmly holding onto that judgement for ourselves, even if it feels terrible and we actually want to release it.
So what’s the way out?
As anything related to unlearning unhelpful beliefs, letting go of old thoughts patterns and cultivating new ones takes time and consistent practice. The way to get started for most of us is by coming up with a list of ways in which pleasurable or fun activities are actually creating beneficial results in our lives. Once we direct our brains to look for the benefits of those actions, we will get more used to noticing and reminding ourselves of those benefits regularly.
The deeper level of the work is to detach the morality of our actions from the production of results altogether. In other words, teaching ourselves that even if the only reason to do something is that we find it fun, that’s more than enough reason to do it, and looking for “more justifiable” results is not necessary. The one major caveat here, of course, is that I’m not talking about any action that causes harm to others around you. What I’m talking about are the pleasurable things that we unnecessarily moralize. Think eating foods that bring you pleasure, relaxing, having sex, watching TV. What if none of those things are any less virtuous than activities that are less pleasurable/more “productive” in your life? And what if we could start releasing ourselves from the guilt, pressure, and vigilance that we have learned to associate with pleasure? In my experience, the only “terrifying” result we’ll see is that we might find ourselves a lot less exhausted.
